Dr. Linda Caruso Haviland, professor at Bryn Mawr College, is the founder and director of its dance program as well as the chair of the arts program. Her scholarly research has included preserving the work of significant Philadelphia dance artists and her present writing projects focus on the rise of a professional class of dancers in turn-of-the-century Philadelphia and on the role of bodiedness in both historiography and the archive. In the fall of 2011 she conceived and coordinated "The Contemporary Performance of Sex, Gender and Embodiment," a symposium held in connection with the Bryn Mawr College residency of choreographer John Jasperse and world premiere of his Fort Blossom Revisited (2000–12) as part of the college's Performing Arts Series.
Caruso Haviland has served as a board member of Dance USA/Philadelphia, and has worked on the organizational and exploratory committees of many other dance organizations. Prior to her work at Bryn Mawr College, Caruso Haviland founded the dance program at SUNY/Westchester Community College and taught in several colleges and universities including Temple University and The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She has performed with companies in New York and Philadelphia, principally with Zero Moving Company under the direction of Hellmut Gottschild. She has also made numerous contributions to the Center's website, including an introduction to the Susan Foster! Susan Foster! danceworkbook and a fall 2013 series on restaging in dance. Haviland also edited the Center's latest publication The Sentient Archive, which features 28 essays by contributors contributors including Tomie Hahn, Patricia Hoffbauer, Jenn Joy, Ralph Lemon, André Lepecki, Bebe Miller, Juhani Pallasmaa, Marcia B. Siegel, and other notable artists and scholars who consider how and why the moving body generates and stores information for recall, retrieval, or reenactment.
